ABSTRACT
The force of at least two of the standard sets of criticisms of conventional pluralism needs to be deflected to some extent. First, there was the issue of the different sorts of interest group brought under the same heading for analytic purposes. The problem with conventional pluralist analysis is not that the need for distinctions was ignored, nor that inequalities between groups were considered insignificant. Bentley finally plumped for a kind of materialism in arriving at a manageable categorization of the basis of group life. His ‘underlying’ groups were, in effect, principles of potential social stratification and included those based on differences of environmental conditions, race, wealth and trade (Bentley 1967: 462). Writers such as Pendleton Herring and Peter Odegard in the 1930s developed an approach to group analysis which deliberately undercut any all-purpose usage of the notion of interests. Under later pressure from critical voices such as those of Schattschneider and Easton, the pluralist persistence with the notion of interest groups was not so much a naive and uncritical levelling of differences as the retention of a convenient label within which more detailed distinctions and comparisons could be made. Dahl’s argument against marxism, for example, was not that class was unimportant, but that when considered as somehow more ‘real’ than other bases of social differences, the importance of the latter (e.g. language, religion, race) was undermined (Dahl 1971: 106–7). His argument – at least as reviewed in retrospect – was that the undeniable persistence of class division in modern society did not entail that class was always and everywhere the major determinant of politics (Dahl 1982: 62). In this context, Dahl is probably right to dismiss as ‘rather absurd’ the charge that the conventional pluralists theorized groups as being equally open, equally well resourced, and equally heard at the political level (Dahl 1982: 208–9).
